Stefan Mileschin

Facebook has announced that it has permanently slashed the pricing of its entry-level Oculus Go 32 GB VR headset to an ‘impulse buy’ level of $149. The move will make virtual reality more accessible for those who want to try basic VR gaming and video playback, but are after something more robust and with better support than various flavors of Google’s Cardboard VR.

Starting today, the Oculus Go 32 GB is priced at $149, whereas the 64 GB version costs $199. In other countries where the VR headset is available, prices have been slashed ‘comparably’ as well, according Oculus VR parent company Facebook.

The Oculus Go is the most basic standalone virtual reality headset available today (at least when it comes to three major VR HMD makers). The device has a 5.5-inch display panel with a 2560×1440 (538 ppi) resolution as well as a 60 – 72 Hz refresh rate (application dependent). The HMD is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 821 SoC (four Kryo cores running at 2.15 – 2.3 GHz, Adreno 530 GPU with ~500 GFLOPS performance, 64-bit LPDDR4 memory, 14LPP) paired with 3 GB of RAM, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and 32 or 64 GB of NAND flash storage that cannot be expanded using an SD card.

As far as battery life is concerned, the the Oculus Go is equipped with a 2600 mAh battery that provides up to two hours of gaming, or 2.5 hours of video playback.

Since the Oculus Go is a standalone VR HMD, it has built-in speakers as well as the 3-degree-of-freedom tracking (3DoF) for the headset and the controller, but does not support positional tracking at all. To that end, the Oculus Go cannot offer the same level of immersion as the Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest, or even the Vive Focus which feature positional tracking.

It is evident that the Oculus Go was developed to be as cheap as possible and all of its tradeoffs are consequences of such design approach. From Oculus VR perspective, the low price and availability of proper content might popularize virtual reality in general among consumers not ready to invest hundreds of dollars in a more advanced gear. To that end, it will be interesting to see how a $50 price slash affects market performance of the Oculus Go.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15419...d-by-25-to-149